Obama: 'We tortured some folks'

President Barack Obama couldn’t have been more blunt in acknowledging that the U.S. crossed a moral line in its treatment of war-on-terror prisoners.

“We tortured some folks,” Obama said during a White House news conference Friday. “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line. And that needs to be understood and accepted.”

Story Continued Below

While the president has used the word “torture” before, it was the most explicit he’s been on the point since taking office. His remarks were also a clear sign of support for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s effort to chronicle and analyze the use of waterboarding and other methods the Bush administration instituted in the war on terror.

Many civil liberties and human rights groups were jittery that Obama would seek a middle ground between the Senate investigators on one hand and former CIA personnel and Bush administration officials who’ve sought to defend the CIA’s efforts by picking apart the Senate report.

White House officials have stoked those fears in recent weeks by stressing that the CIA would have a chance to offer a rebuttal to the Senate report and by helping to broker a deal for former agency officials to get an advance look at the document.

However, there was little sign Friday of a split-the-difference strategy from the president.

“The character of our country has to be measured in part, not by what we do when things are easy, but what we do when things are hard,” Obama said.

Although the president’s moral verdict on the Bush-era interrogation tactics was unmistakable, he did express some sympathy for the officials who ordered them in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

”In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some things that were wrong — we did a whole lot of things that were right, but we did some things that were contrary to our values,” Obama said. “I understand why it happened. It’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were.”

“People did not know whether more attacks were imminent. And there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots,” the president said.

“But, having said all that, we did some things that were wrong. And that’s what that report reflects,” Obama added.

Obama also rallied to the side of CIA Director John Brennan, who was a senior official at the spy agency during the Bush era but was not in the decision-making chain about the interrogation practices. Brennan has had a stormy relationship with some in Congress and came under fire again this week after an inspector general report concluded that CIA staffers wrongly examined computer files and e-mails on a computer system Senate staffers were using to prepare the interrogation report.